NFL: NEW BEGINNINGS : Both Teams Expand, but in Opposite Directions : Pro football: Jacksonville’s Coughlin keeps tight rein on players, while Carolina’s Capers prefers looser approach.

The differences are apparent at first knock.

The security guard for the Jacksonville Jaguars glares and asks for identification.

The security guard for the Carolina Panthers smiles and asks if you want a cold drink.

The differences are also apparent at introduction.

Tom Coughlin, Jacksonville’s coach, acknowledges that he doesn’t allow his players to sit on their helmets. Or slouch in the huddle. Or show up at the stadium wearing clothes bearing a sports insignia other than a Jaguar. And he acknowledges it is troubling.

“Sometimes I drive myself crazy, writing down that I have to use the bathroom at 9:01 a.m., things like that,” Coughlin said. “But it’s like I have to be perfect. I can’t swallow anything else.”

Dom Capers, Carolina’s coach, acknowledges that he will be leaving work around noon on this midsummer day to serve as grand marshal of a Charlotte auto race known as the Red Dog 300. And so what?

“The only thing I know about auto racing is turning on ESPN and watching guys crashing,” he said. “But what the heck.”

The differences have also been apparent at training camp.

That recent eruption heard in Stevens Point, Wis., was Coughlin scolding receivers Desmond Howard and Ernest Givins, ordering them to forget about that little hamstring pain, put on their pads, and get their fannies out to the practice field.

“This is going to be a football player’s camp,” Coughlin said. “We’ll see who wants to step it up, bang it out, be aggressive, get after it.”

That eruption heard in Spartanburg, S.C., was cheering.

It was a bunch of virtually unknown Panther players rooting for another of their kind, 350-pound Kevin Farkas, who was trying to run his 40-yard sprints under the mandatory time.

One player waved a towel in Farkas’ face. Another used a towel to cool his back. And Farkas made it. His teammates howled into the night.

“Some of the players at Jacksonville say they are treated like they are in high school,” said Panther safety Bubba McDowell. “Here, they treat you like a man.”

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They have been publicized as the NFL’s cute little expansion twins. By joining the league in the same season--they will even play each other in their initial games next week--the Jacksonville Jaguars and Carolina Panthers are bound together.

Which just about makes them want to throw up.

Although born less than two months apart in the fall of 1994, the league’s two new teams are from different eras.

To look at the Jaguars is to glimpse football’s future. Eighteen-hour days, 12 months a year, veterans running timed sprints in March, coaches studying films on June mornings before the dew disappears.

Coughlin, former offensive whiz with the New York Giants, hired away from Boston College in the winter after the 1993 season, was working that hard last season even when he didn’t have a team.

He studied films during the week, scouted on weekends, and even used his computer to play games between his nonexistent squad and real ones.

“He’s just very intense, without much patience for those who do things other than the way he wants them done,” said Steve Beuerlein, Jacksonville quarterback. “When that happens, he goes off.”

Coughlin has enough rules to fill a Florida tourist brochure, covering everything from the feet to the eyes.

Eyes?

“Well, I have this thing about sunglasses,” Coughlin said. “I just don’t think they look good, period.”

So nobody associated with the organization can attend practice wearing sunglasses. Period. Talk about long afternoons in the Sun Belt.

Coughlin also has a thing about hair. Journeyman Andrew Moore’s Mohawk haircut caught Coughlin’s eye at a meeting last spring.

“What is that?” Coughlin reportedly shouted. “Get rid of it.”

Moore promptly shaved his head--then was surprised to learn that his hair was not the only thing that had been cut.

Then there was Ferric Collons, former Raider defensive tackle who engaged in three fights during Coughlin’s aggressive spring minicamp workout.

After the last fight, Collons was so upset he threw his opponent’s helmet 40 yards. Coughlin ordered Collons to retrieve the helmet. Collons, deciding that the action would humiliate him, refused.

Coughlin released him on the spot, reportedly saying, “Bye, bye, bye.”

The next day, seven teams tried to sign Collons before he landed in Green Bay.

“A number of NFL teams commented to me that Coughlin was running a boot camp down there, a stalag, “ said Angelo Wright, Collons’ agent. “You can take guys off the street and beat them up, but can you give away a defensive lineman who was sought by seven teams the next day?

“I really feel sorry for those players down there if they go three games and lose all of them.”

Coughlin smiles at that kind of talk.

“I like to put people in uncomfortable situations, see who can do the job, see who the leaders are,” he said. “This is all very planned.”

But the game seems very different at Carolina. Led in the front office by old football men, Mike McCormack and Bill Polian, the Panthers are a team from yesterday.

From the off-season, unofficial team meetings at a South Carolina sports bar to the laughing on the practice field, these are pros who think like collegians.

The Panthers don’t cut high-strung players, they sign them, hoping that the family atmosphere will change them. Loudmouth cornerback Tim McKyer will be one of the defensive leaders. Troubled running back Barry Foster will lead the offense.

Off-season workouts were casual. Players weren’t afraid to miss a voluntary session to attend a friend’s wedding, unlike the situation in Jacksonville.

Capers wasn’t even hired until after last season, when he made his name by harnessing some of the Pittsburgh Steelers’ most precocious athletes into the league’s best defense.

“I like to think that guys at this level have a certain emotional maturity and competitive maturity,” Capers said. “I coach guys the way I wanted to be coached. Why yell if you don’t need to?”

*

In keeping with their theme, the Panthers will spend most of this year relying on older players, from Foster to quarterback Frank Reich to receivers Don Beebe and Mark Carrier. The defense is loaded with such veterans as linemen Mike Fox and Gerald Williams, linebackers Sam Mills and Lamar Lathon, and safety McDowell.

The Jaguars have gone the other direction, and could potentially start rookies James Stewart and Ryan Christopherson in their backfield, rookie Tony Boselli of USC at tackle, and several young unproven players on defense.

Because of the advantages of free agency, neither team is expected to be as bad as previous expansion teams.

Going back to 1960, none of the eight pro football expansion teams--six in the NFL, two in the since-absorbed American Football League--won more than three games its first year, the cumulative first-season record of 17-91-1 averaging out to 2.1 victories a team.

Playing in an AFC Central Division that includes the Houston Oilers and Cincinnati Bengals, the Jaguars could win two games by Thanksgiving.

The Panthers are in the much tougher NFC West, but benefit from home games against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and New York Jets, and a road game at the weak Washington Redskins.

“I remember a lot of people from other clubs complaining that the league gave these teams too much,” said John Thompson, the first general manager of the Seattle Seahawks, who joined the league in 1976. “I don’t remember them saying that to us.

“On the surface, these teams seem to have it easier because they don’t have to build completely through the draft. Now that takes time.”

These players should also feel much more popular than their expansion predecessors. Their teams are joining the league at a peak in the NFL’s popularity, in cities where fans are paying as much as $5,000 merely for the right to buy season tickets.

Jacksonville’s renovated Gator Bowl--to be renamed soon in the name of the highest bidder--is sold out for the next three years.

The new stadium in downtown Charlotte, N.C., opening in 1996, has promised to be equally popular, although the Panthers could play to some empty seats in isolated Clemson Stadium, two hours from Charlotte in South Carolina, this season.

Not that their popularity will suffer. Bubba McDowell is still amazed by his recent apartment search near the team’s temporary headquarters in South Carolina.

He found a place he liked, but the sign outside said “No Vacancies.”

He phoned the manager the next day hoping to get on a waiting list. He mentioned that he was a Panther.

“She said, ‘Really! Come in tomorrow and we’ll work something out.’ ” McDowell said. “Suddenly, an apartment was there. Amazing.”

Dave Widell, Jaguar center, remembers an equally amazing thing that happened to him off the field in Jacksonville.

He was walking into the stadium from the parking lot when he was accosted by Coughlin and told that his tight gray shorts were unacceptable dress for a Jaguar in public, that they looked too much like underwear.

“Hey,” said Widell, a Coughlin backer. “The only thing fun about this game is the final tick of the clock.”